POETRY (3)

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Various

Fortunatus Nimium

1

I have lain in the sun,
 I have toiled as I might,
 I have thought as I would,
 And now it is night.

2

My bed full of sleep,
 My heart of content
 For mirth that I met
 The way that I went.

3

I welcome fatigue
 While frenzy and care,
 Like thin summer clouds,
 Go melting in air.

4

To dream as I may
 And awake when I will,
 With the song of the birds
 And the sun on the hill.

5

Or death—were it death,
 To what should I wake,
 Who loved in my home
 All life for its sake?

6

What good have I wrought?
 I laugh to have learned
 That joy cannot come
 Unless it be earned:

7

For a happier lot
 Than God giveth me
 It never hath been
 Nor ever shall be.
ROBERT BRIDGES

To E. G.

Were I to pause and hesitate
 For something "picked," "alembicate,"
 I might, by chance, no further get
 Than mere parade of epithet;
 So I'll just wish to You and Yours
 Strength to achieve while strength endures;
 And, when the power to do is done,
 Remembered radiance of the sun!
AUSTIN DOBSON

New Year's Eve, 1919.

The Shadow

Death, would I feared not thee,.
 But ever can I see
 Thy mutable shadow thrown
 Upon the walls of Life's warm, cheerful room.
 Companioned or alone,
 I feel the presence of that following gloom,
 Like one who vaguely knows
 Behind his back the shade his body throws
 'Tis not thy shadow only, 'tis my own!
I face towards the light
 That rises fair and bright
 Over wide fields asleep,
 But still I know that stealthy darkness there
 Close at my heels doth creep,
 Ghostly companion, my still haunting care;
 And if the light be strong
 Before my eyes, through pleasant hours and long,
 Then, then, the shadow is most black and deep.
EDWARD SHANKS

By the Weir

A scent of Esparta grass—and again I recall
 The hour we spent by the weir of the paper-mill
 Watching together the curving thunderous fall
 Of frothing amber, bemused by the roar until
 My mind was as blank as the speckless sheets that wound
 On the hot steel ironing-rollers perpetually turning
 In the humming dark rooms of the mill: all sense and discerning
 By the stunning and dazzling oblivion of hill-waters drowned.
And my heart was empty of memory and hope and desire
 Till, rousing, I looked afresh on your face as you gazed—
 Behind you an old gnarled fruit-tree in one still fire
 Of innumerable flame in the sun of October blazed,
 Scarlet and gold that the first white frost would spill
 With eddying flicker and patter of dead leaves falling—
 I looked on your face, as an outcast from Eden recalling
 A vision of Eve as she dallied, bewildered and still,
By the serpent-encircled tree of knowledge that flamed
 With gold and scarlet of good and evil, her eyes
 Rapt on the river of life: then bright and untamed
 By the labour and sorrow and fear of a world that dies
 Your ignorant eyes looked up into mine, and I knew
 That never our hearts should be one till your young lips had tasted
The core of the bitter-sweet fruit, and wise and toil-wasted
 You should stand at my shoulder an outcast from Eden too.
WILFRID WILSON GIBSON

Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan!

A RHYME IN THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE

(The campaign of Eighteen Ninety-six, as viewed by a sixteen-year-old)

I

In a nation of one hundred fine mob-hearted, lynching, relenting, repenting millions
 There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things to shout about,
 And knock your old blue devils out.
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
 Candidate for President who sketched a silver Zion,
 The one American poet who could sing outdoors.
 He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendour,
 Wild roses from the plains that made hearts tender,
 All the funny circus silks
 Of politics unfurled,
 Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores,
 And torchlights down the street, to the end of the world.
There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle;
 There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle;
 There were real lines drawn:
 Not the silver and the gold,
 But Nebraska's cry went eastward against the dour and old,
 The mean and cold.
It was Eighteen Ninety-six, and I was just sixteen,
 And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois,
 When there came from the sunset Nebraska's shout of joy:
 In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat,
 He scourged the elephant plutocrats
 With barbed wire from the Platte.
 The scales dropped from their mighty eyes.
 They saw that summer's noon
 A tribe of wonders coming
 To a marching tune.
 Oh, the long horns from Texas,
 The jay hawks from Kansas,
 The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,
 The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,
 The horned toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo,
 From all the new-born States arow,
 Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
 Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
 The fawn, prodactyl and thing-a-ma-jig,
 The hellangone,
 The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,
 The coyote, wild-cat and grizzly in a glow,
 In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,
 They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West,
 From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long:
 Against the towns of Tubal Cain,
 Ah—sharp was their song!
 Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,
 The long-horn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue.
These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed:
 The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed,
 The gossamers and whimsies,
 The monkeyshines and didoes
 Rank and strange
 Of the caÑons and the range,
 The ultimate fantastics
 Of the far western slope,
 And of prairie schooner children
 Born beneath the stars,
 Beneath falling snows,
 Of the babies born at midnight
 In the sod huts of lost hope,
 With no physician there
 Except a Kansas prayer,
 With the Indian raid a-howling through the air.
And all these in their helpless days
 By the dour East oppressed,
 Mean paternalism
 Making their mistakes for them,
 Crucifying half the West,
 Till the whole Atlantic coast
 Seemed a giant spider's nest.
 And these children and their sons
 At last rode through the cactus,
 A cliff of mighty cowboys
 On the lope,
 With gun and rope.
 And all the way to frightened Maine the old East heard them call,
 And saw our Bryan by a mile lead the wall
 Of men and whirling flowers and beasts,
 The bard and the prophet of them all.
 Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
 Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
 Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
 Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,
 And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky,
 Blotting out sun and moon,
 A sign on high.
Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light,
 The scalawags made moan,
 Afraid to fight.

II

When Bryan came to Springfield, and Altgeld gave him greeting,
 Rochester was deserted, Divernon was deserted,
 Mechanicsburg, Riverton, Chickenbristle, Cotton Hill,
 Empty: for all Sangamon drove to the meeting—
 In silver-decked racing cart,
 Buggy, buckboard, carryall,
 Carriage, phaeton, whatever would haul,
 And silver-decked farm-waggons gritted, banged and rolled,
 With the new tale of Bryan by the iron tyres told.
The State House loomed afar,
 A speck, a hive, a football,
 A captive balloon,
 And the town was all one spreading wing of bunting, plumes and sunshine,
 Every flag in town, and Bryan's picture sold,
 When the rigs in many a line
 Reached the town at noon,
 And joined the wild parade against the power of gold
We roamed, we boys from High School,
 With mankind,
 While Springfield gleamed,
 Silk-lined.
 Oh, Tom Dines, and Art Fitzgerald,
 And the gangs that they could get!
 I can hear them yelling yet
 Helping the incantation,
 Defying aristocracy,
 With every bridle gone,
 Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
 Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
 Ridding the world of the low-down mean:
 We were bully, wild and woolly,
 Never yet carried below the knees.
 We saw flowers in the air,
 Fair as the Pleiades, bright as Orion,
 Hopes of all mankind,
 Made rare, resistless, thrice refined.
 Oh, we bucks from every Springfield ward!
 Colts of democracy—
 Yet time-winds out of Chaos from the star-fields of the Lord.
The long parade rolled on. I stood by my best girl.
 She was a cool young citizen, with wise and laughing eyes.
 With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear,
 But she kept like a pattern, without a shaken curl.
She wore in her hair a brave prairie rose.
 Her gold chums cut her, for that was not the pose.
 No Gibson Girl would wear it in that fresh way,
 But we were fairy Democrats, and this was our day.
The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck.
 The houses for the moment were lost in the wide wreck.
 And the bands played strange and stranger music as they trailed along.
 Against the ways of Tubal Cain,
 Ah, sharp was their song!
 The demons in the bricks, the demons in the grass,
 The demons in the bank-vaults peered out to see us pass.
 And the angels in the trees, the angels in the grass,
 The angels in the flags peered out to see us pass.
 And the sidewalk was our chariot, and the flowers bloomed higher,
 And the street turned to silver and the grass turned to fire,
 And then it was but grass, and the town was there again,
 A place for women and men.

III

Then we stood where we could see
 Every band,
 And the speaker's stand.
 And Bryan took the platform,
 And he was introduced.
 And he lifted his hand
 And cast a new spell.
 Progressive silence fell
 In Springfield,
 In Illinois,
 Around the world.
 Then we heard these glacial boulders across the prairie rolled:
 "The people have a right to make their own mistakes ...
 You shall not crucify mankind
 Upon a cross of gold."
And everybody heard him—
 In the streets and State House yard.
 And everybody heard him
 In Springfield,
 In Illinois,
 Around and around and around the world,
 That danced upon its axis
 And like a daring broncho whirled.

IV

July, August, suspense.
 Wall Street lost to sense.
 August, September, October,
 More suspense,
 And the whole East down like a wind-smashed fence.
Then Hanna to the rescue,
 Hanna of Ohio,
 Rallying the roller-tops,
 Swivel chairs, bulls and bears,
 Rallying the bucket-shops,
 Threatening drouth and death,
 Promising Mannah.
 Rallying the trusts against the bawling flannelmouth;
 Invading misers' cellars,
 Tin-cans, socks,
 Melting down the rocks,
 Pouring out the long green to a million workers,
 Spondulicks by the mountain-load to stop each new tornado,
 And beat the cheapskate, blatherskite,
 Populistic, anarchistic,
 Deacon-desperado.

V

Election night at midnight:
 Boy Bryan's defeat.
 Defeat of western silver,
 Defeat of the wheat.
 Victory of letterfiles
 And plutocrats in miles
 With dollar signs upon their coats,
 Diamond watchchains on their vests
 And spats on their feet.
 Victory of custodians,
 Plymouth Rock,
 And all that inbred landlord stock.
 Victory of the neat.
 Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,
 The bluebells of the Rockies,
 And blue bonnets of old Texas,
 By the Pittsburg alleys.
 Defeat of alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.
 Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.
 Defeat of the young by the old and silly.
 Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
 Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.

VI

Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley,
 The man without an angle or a tangle,
 Who soothed down the city man and soothed down the farmer,
 The German, the Irish, the Southerner, the Northerner;
 Who climbed every greasy pole, and slipped through every crack;
 Who soothed down the gambling hall, the bar-room, the church,
 The devil vote, the angel vote, the neutral vote,
 The desperately wicked, and their victims on the rack,
 The gold vote, the silver vote, the brass vote, the lead vote,
 Every vote....
Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna's McKinley,
 His slave, his echo, his suit of clothes?
 Gone to join the shadows, with the pomps of that time,
 And the flame of that summer's prairie rose.
Where is Cleveland whom the Democratic platform
 Read from the party in a wonderful hour?
 Gone to join the shadows with pitchfork Tillman
 And sledge-hammer Altgeld, who wrecked his power
Where is Hanna, bull-dog Hanna,
 Low browed Hanna, who said: "Stand pat"?
 Gone to his own place with Pierpont Morgan.
 Gone somewhere ... with lean rat Platt.
Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy,
 Who hated Bryan, then aped his way?
 Gone to join the shadows with pious Cromwell
 And tall King Saul, till the Judgment Day.
Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,
 Whose name the few still say with tears?
 Gone to join the ironies with Old John Brown,
 Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.
Where is that boy, that Heaven-born Bryan,
 That Homer Bryan, who sang from the West?
 Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,
 Where the Kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.
VACHEL LINDSAY

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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